WhatsApp is claiming that a new lawsuit accusing it of failing to encrypt users’ communications is simply retaliation from an Israeli spyware company it has been battling for years.
The longstanding fight pits Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp against the NSO Group, which is led by investors helmed by Hollywood powerhouse producer Robert Simonds — and whose infamous chief hacking tool is known as Pegasus.
In one of the latest legal rounds between them, a federal judge ordered NSO to pay Meta Platforms $4 million in punitive damages for targeting Meta users with its spyware.
The law firm representing NSO in that case is allegedly now behind another lawsuit from plaintiffs who sued WhatsApp on Friday over privacy issues, leading Meta executives to cry foul.
“For a decade, WhatsApp has protected messages with end-to-end encryption so that no one else can read them,” said WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart in a statement to The Post on Monday.
“This lawsuit has no merit and is a distraction peddled by the same law firm defending NSO group from a court injunction barring their operations.
“We’re pushing back because it’s important everyone stands up against spyware that threatens people’s ability to communicate freely and securely.”
People familiar with both lawsuits offered conflicting opinions, with some viewing NSO’s complaint as part of a broader effort by it to go after WhatsApp and others saying the two cases had no bearing on each other.
The Biden administration had placed NSO on the Department of Commerce’s trade “blacklist” for “malicious cyber activities” in late 2021, imposing some licensing requirements on the firm.
NSO’s Pegasus system was most infamously alleged to have been used by the Saudi Arabian government to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his murder, as well as 189 other journalists.
David Friedman, President Trump’s US ambassador to Israel during his first term, was eventually made NSO’s executive chairman to burnish the spyware company’s reputation in the US, the Wall Street Journal reported last year.
In the suit filed last week against Meta, plaintiffs from Brazil, South Africa, India and Australia allege that their WhatsApp messages are not private as promised.
They claimed that whistleblowers, who were not immediately identified, have found billions more users with their encrypted communications accessible.
Adam Wolfson, a partner with plaintiff law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, alleges in the suit that Meta employees only need to ask an engineer for access, which is then granted “often without any scrutiny at all.”
“WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint — that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption,” he told The Post.
A Meta rep called the suit “frivolous” and vowed that the company would “pursue sanctions against plaintiff’s counsel.”
